I don’t think in terms of “collapse” along the same lines. For me the collapse is marked by the breakdown of values, beliefs, individuation, allienation, lack of ideas, lack of optimism - but all of these are recoverable. I’m optimistic about our future and I feel like the new paradigm is being born, but needs a big push.
There is no question that there is an ongoing breakdown in values, beliefs, etc… That has been going on for decades already.
It sounds like you are saying you don’t think civilisation is going to collapse – and by that I mean climate change of at least 5 degrees, ecological collapse, breakdown of the economic-monetary system and a die-off of at least 50% of the current population.
You don’t think any of that is going to happen?
I think it is already unavoidable. The processes has already started and cannot be stopped. The question is what comes next – what new sort of world can be forged during the collapse.
If you don’t accept any of that, then I’m not surprised you don’t agree with the rest of what I am saying. Our positions are worlds apart. I already thought you were a theoretical anti-realist – now it seems you are a practical anti-realist also.
I’d say that one should question everything - there’s no absolute certainty about complex systems as far as our ability to comprehend them at the moment. Even if we know the trends, we can’t be sure of the behaviour of the system at its limits. But, I might be wrong!
When you say that the collapse is unavoidable, is there anything on the short-term horizon that you think you can predict? If you can indeed guess outcomes of complex systems’ interactions and you could substantiate it - that would certainly make me (and others) become much more sympathetic to your ideas.
1 Like
@GeoffDann Just wanted to say how extremely grateful I am for your engagement and the depth and quality of the discourse that you’ve started in recent days! 
1 Like
When you say that the collapse is unavoidable, is there anything on the short-term horizon that you think you can predict? If you can indeed guess outcomes of complex systems’ interactions and you could substantiate it - that would certainly make me (and others) become much more sympathetic to your ideas.
Predicting the path of collapse in the short term is a mug’s game. The problem is that we are looking at a chaotic breakdown, and individual decisions have huge consequences. Just look at Donald Trump, for all the examples needed – who could have predicted that a US president would side with Russia and NK in a crucial UN vote, against the rest of NATO, or threaten to invade Canada?
The Peak Oil theorists showed how wrong this can go. They predicted peak oil correctly – the first big spike in oil prices when conventional global demand exceeded supply capacity – and they were correct to predict huge economic consequences. But pretty much all of them predicted that the price of oil would just stay very high, choking off the global economy. None of them predicted that it would trigger an accident-waiting-to-happen in the US sub-prime mortgage market which would cause a credit crisis and the biggest bank bailout in recent history, which caused the oil price to crash.
So I am not in the business of making short term predictions. It is much easier to make bigger, broader predictions. For example, we aren’t even going to limit climate change, let alone stop it. Game Theory tells us why. I saw it coming in 1989, and have been trying to explain it to people ever since. In order to limit climate change we actually need to leave economically viable fossil fuels in the ground – everything else is just talk. And nobody is seriously considering that – they never have done. “Net Zero” serves no purpose but to string out the fossil fuels for longer – it keeps civilisation powered for a while longer, but makes zero difference to the final net amount of climate change.
Hi Geoff, that’s interesting. A ‘revolution’ itself is an artefact produced by the civilisation project, isn’t it? Are there no other options than solving problems or letting nature take its course?
Isn’t ‘solving problems’ a part of why the situation is as it is?
You might be interested to read ‘Hospicing Modernity’?
Thanks. It is a pleasure for me to actually find a group of people who are interested in talking about these things in this depth and actually capable of doing so. This in itself is significant progress.
It may also be more than that too. I think the quantum dice rolls might be helping things along. Maybe it is time for things to start happening. It feels like the scenery is shifting into place.
1 Like
I disagree that long term predictions are easier to make than short term predictions. Major factors in evaluating risk are time and volatility.
And just to emphasise the importance of perspectives - what’s happening in the world today including Donald Trump is very logical, explainable and coherent to some people.
OK, apart from Canada and Greenland threats, but once in the open - they make sense too.
We can either consciously try to fix civilisation, or we can let nature take its course. I don’t see any other options – that looks like a binary choice to me.
I believe civilisation as we know it is going to collapse. A lot of people, when they realise this is inevitable, just give up. They are overwhelmed, can’t see any solutions, and usually react badly to other people who do anything other than agree with their total pessimism.
But the majority of the population is not just going to give up. When they realise civilisation is collapsing (and they will) then they will try to survive. There will be a focus on survival at every level from the individual up to the sovereign state (above that level things are likely to just keep getting worse for a long time to come).
I believe it is important to focus on an end goal here. Instead of just giving up, we need to focus minds on what a sustainable civilisation might actually look like, and ask how we can get from here to there. I think that if we do that, then it will turn out that a lot of the thinking/actions/reorganisation/evolution that is required for survival is also required for building an ecocivilisation. There is no clash – we can offer a vision where “national survival” and “construction an ecocivilisation at the national level” are essentially the same thing. And if that happens in multiple nations at the same time then a path might just open up for co-operation on a global scale.
The question therefore becomes about how we can find the “best” path from here to there. How can we change the ideology and the thinking to facilitate this transformation? How can we use ideas to turn collapse into transformation? This is where 2R comes in. It’s what it is for.
I haven’t read it, no. You are the second person to mention it recently though. I’ll add it to the list.
There’s no quality in the majority - apart from quantity. We’ve seen that time and time again - a handful of lions rule the savannah, whales feast on krill, dictators run countries, intellectuals control the discourse… Who needs convincing is the people that can do something about it. Just being aware of a problem but lacking capacity is not enough.
The best path is to turn the values of the 2R into something that the dominant classes would aspire to as well. To make progressive values more "appealing or palatable* to the “powerful” —those who hold resources, influence, or societal authority.
The stake in the world’s making has always been oversubscribed by the few… That’s realism.
Let me be sure I understand what you see as the only alternative to letting nature take its course. Are you saying we should first imagine a sustainable future and then work out how to build it, or at least create a path leading towards it?
OK, apart from Canada and Greenland threats, but once in the open - they make sense too.
…and the idea that the US can “take over Gaza” and turn it into a holiday resort, or that Tommy Robinson should be pardoned, or that the US can take ownership of the Panama canal “because thousands of our people died building it”, or that Zelenskyy is a dictator, or that there’s anything reasonable about Putin…
He’s a demented idiot that should never have been allowed anywhere near power the first time, let alone allowed to return after what happened at the end of his last tenure.
There you go - your social conditioning has given you a certain disposition where you think that what you believe is common sense is actually the objective common sense. That just doesn’t hold water. What would give your personal views authority? Just because I might share your views means nothing.
From Trump’s perspective - it’s empire building and I’m sure it makes some sort of sense… In democracy we believe that “the majority” has a right to choose their leaders.
I personally believe that “imagining future” and working towards it is the best way. Otherwise you run into design compromises because you’re operating along the lines of your current understanding of the limitations, which might be incorrect.
1 Like
Something like that, yes. I have a book coming out later this year. It is called The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation, subtitle is From collapse to coherence: integrating science, spirituality and sustainability in the West. It argues that we need to figure out how to Westernise the (currently Chinese/Soviet) concept of ecocivilisation, and then decide which is the least bad path from here to there. And my argument is we need 2R (details to be confirmed) to enable that – that the least bad path involves a revolutionary new epistemological paradigm to enable the transformation of Western thinking, behaviour and society. China is building its concept on Marxism and Taoism. The West has neither – we have Christianity, capitalism, democracy, materialism and postmodernism, none of which are fit for this purpose.
I have spent the last 16 years trying to make this work as a book – I set myself a goal of writing a book which was both brutally honest and yet offered real hope for humanity, and which was also a viable project for a mass-market book. It is no use if only 200 copies get sold. So my question ended up being how to keep people reading when the message is so difficult to accept. In the end I blended many different genres – pop philosophy, autobiography, a fictional future timeline and the contents of a fictional future book which combines mysticism and science in a way that has never been done before. One of my test readers compared the result to the Beatles song A Day in the Life.
There you go - your social conditioning has given you a certain disposition where you think that what you believe is common sense is actually the objective common sense. That just doesn’t hold water. What would give your personal views authority? Just because I might share your views means nothing.
Actually, all I was saying was that Trump is unpredictable, and using that as an example as to why there is no point in trying to predict the short-term details of a chaotic collapse. I don’t think this is a particularly radical claim.
I am interested in the long-term future and in what real sustainability looks like. In the short term I’ve got no more idea what is going to happen than anybody else does. All I can do is prep. I run a smallholding.
I totally share your goal. I have been seeking to integrate science and spirituality since 1961, when at the request of the Church of England, I switched my undergraduate studies from Electrical Engineering to Theology.
I also fear for the future of humanity, and believe that civilisation has led us into murky waters, whereby we have become a force of nature that now threatens the relatively stable conditions of the Holocene that have prevailed and provided the stability for we humans to flourish throughout the period in which civilisation has developed, and to multiply from a few million people to more than 8 billion.
Where we differ is that you see only one alternative to letting nature take its course.
I agree that Christianity, capitalism, democracy, materialism, and postmodernism as practiced today all contribute to the problem. They are all people’s ideas about a desirable future. Why should we believe the next human construct will turn out any better?
I don’t believe that we have only a binary choice.
I see at least three paths: do nothing, think and then try to build something better (which is my description of your proposal), or participate in the worlds systems, whilst learning deeply how to think and act in ways that correct our mistaken beliefs of human exceptionalism, and seeks to restore harmonious relationships with all parts of the Earth systems: living and non-living, human and non-human.
There are probably more - but I worry that what you are suggesting amounts to repeating the efforts of good men and women throughout history, while hoping for a different result this time.
And Kudos to you for opening up this dialogue, which is probably why most of us are here on this forum.
1 Like
We have no guarantee that the next civilisation will get it right. It may take several reboots and 10,000 years before we get it right. What I am saying is that “right” has got to mean ecologically right. Ecocivilisation isn’t necessarily what comes next, but unless we’re going extinct then we will get there eventually. No other long-term outcome is possible, since no species can remain out of balance with its ecosystem forever. Evolution forbids this.
I think you might see this differently if/when you read my book.
And Kudos to you for opening up this dialogue, which is probably why most of us are here on this forum.
That is literally the purpose of the book – to introduce a new language game – “the language game of ecocivilisation”. I do not have a blueprint for ecocivilisation. I have a proposal for an epistemological agreement to enable the discussions we need to start having right now. A Council of Ecocivilisation is needed to come up with the blueprint. And I think that is basically us.
From the book:
The Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein’s other book was the Philosophical Investigations (1953), on which he worked over his many years teaching at Cambridge. It consists of a collection of short passages about philosophy, this time with a focus on a different theory of language – that of “language games”. This time his claim was that our usage of language is much like different sorts of games we play – each language game has its own set of assumptions and rules, which under normal circumstances are never questioned from within the game itself. Much of our confusion, especially philosophical confusion, is the result of people using incommensurate (i.e. incompatible) language games without acknowledging that this is what is happening.
I’ll give two examples that are directly relevant to the subject matter of this book.
Example 1: An ecologist talks to an economist about economic growth.
In the language game of economics, growth is considered to be both sustainable and desirable, and one of the main goals of policy. Anybody who questions this is not taken seriously by other participants in that language game. In the language game of ecology, economic growth is viewed as intrinsically dependent on the growth of the physical human operation on Planet Earth, and since humans are already well into ecological overshoot this can only be unsustainable and therefore undesirable. The conflict arises because ecology is grounded in hard scientific reality, whereas economics is a quasi-scientific discipline based primarily on politics and psychology. That is not to say that human politics and psychology aren’t part of reality – they surely are – but as academic subjects or language games they are not constrained by physical reality in the way hard sciences like physics and ecology are. Economics starts with conclusions derived from politics and psychology, and then attempts to find a scientific-sounding theory to support those conclusions. There is no other way we could end up with “theories” like Trickle-down Economics and Modern Monetary Theory.
We therefore have two incommensurate language games, and that means that if an ecologist is debating an economist about anything concerning growth, they will just end up talking past each other. It’s like trying to have a game where one side is playing football and the other is playing rugby: there’s no point.
Example 2: A physicist talks to a new-age mystic about energy.
In the language game of physics, the concept of energy has a clearly defined meaning. It refers to a specific physical concept, and the meaning is understood with zero risk of confusion by anybody who knows how to play that language game. In the language game of new-age mysticism this word means something rather different. A new ager believes they are talking about something real, and they’ve chosen the word “energy” because they have no better one, but what do they actually mean when they say it? Sometimes it seems to have some sort of relationship with the scientific meaning – it’s about “something that makes things happen” – but the meaning is much broader, encompassing things that, in a scientific context, are indistinguishable from magic. Again, we have two incommensurate language games, and when physicists and new-agers try to have a discussion about “energy”, nothing is likely to be achieved unless this situation is recognised for what it is. The way forwards, I believe, is to pay closer attention to the vocabulary and precise usage, and the context in which the discussion is taking place. What exactly does it mean to say that new-age metaphysics is indistinguishable from magic? Could there be magic that doesn’t contradict physics? Could there be magical laws?
The transition from civilisation to ecocivilisation will require ecologists, economists, scientists, mystics and all sorts of other people to be able to understand each other considerably better than they do now. This can only be made possible by some sort of over-arching epistemic system or agreement that provides shared understanding of the appropriate relationships between ecology, physics, economics, politics, ethics, the mystical and anything else that can’t be left out. To misquote Chief Brody – we’re going to need a bigger language game.
We cannot enact a society-wide paradigm shift without majority support. Postmodernism tried to do exactly that, and it has not just failed but seriously backfired.
The best path is to turn the values of the 2R into something that the dominant classes would aspire to as well. To make progressive values more "appealing or palatable* to the “powerful” —those who hold resources, influence, or societal authority.
We are clearly going to need at least some of those people on board too. It cannot be done if they are united in resisting it. Yes, it must be something for all to aspire to, but we cannot accommodate that class of people currently mis-named as “elite”. I am talking about the super-rich who hide their money in unaccountable tax havens, and use their immense wealth to protect the status quo. We are going to have to get rid of both that class of people and that sort of non-state. They are a major problem.